I am pleased to announce that Kathleen Smith has accepted our offer to become the Germanic Studies Subject Specialist. She will start work in this position at the beginning of January. While this will be her first professional librarian job, Kathleen will come to Stanford with an impressive scholarly profile and record of international experience.

She has an undergraduate degree in German Studies and English from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MLIS from the University of Texas at Austin. Kathleen’s PhD dissertation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "Curating the Collector: Exploring Representations of Early Modern German Women Book Collectors (1650-1780)," is particularly appropriate to library interests.

In addition to her academic work, Kathleen has been active in international digital humanities projects both in the US and in Germany. She will be coming to Stanford directly from Germany, where for the past two years she has been a post-doc and research fellow in the Research and Development Department of the State and University Library in Gottingen, Germany. Kathleen worked to develop and provide outreach for TextGrid, a sustainable virtual research environment; more recently she has worked with historians and technical developers to gather user requirements and coordinate the technical implementation to create online portals that support archival research in medieval studies and World War I history.

I'd like to thank the search committee – Henry Lowood, Peter Blank, and Professor Kathryn Starkey – as well as everyone in the Libraries who participated in this search. After meeting her during her interview, I'm sure that she will be a congenial and thoughtful colleague and an excellent addition to our group. We are looking forward to welcoming Kathleen to SUL in January!